The introduction of High Definition Television (HDTV) and the flat panel display has led to new and pleasant experience in watching television. The slimness of a flat panel television set saves space and allows a consumer to place a larger television in a room of limited size. HDTV sets support high resolution and better picture quality. Many HDTV sets sold today are flat panel television sets.
Along with the improved resolution and picture quality, the trend in HDTV sales has been towards a general increase in the size of the average television display. For example, in United States, the average size of a HDTV set sold is now approximately 30 inches, diagonal. In some Asian countries, the average size is even larger than 32 inches.
A large screen allows a consumer to more comfortably view multiple pictures. For example, a consumer may watch the Super Bowl on a large picture on the display screen, while simultaneously viewing an NBA game between the Sacramento Kings and the LA Lakers on a smaller picture, a local college basketball between Stanford and Berkeley on a third picture, and a hockey game between New York Islanders and Anaheim Ducks on a fourth picture on the television display. Not to miss any important news, the consumer may view CNN or FOX on a fifth picture. Last but not least, they may also view a sixth picture, such as from a baby monitor their 8-month old baby's room, at the same time. On a traditional smaller television screen, having six picture frames displaying simultaneously on the screen would necessitate that at least some of the picture frames would be so small as to be difficult to view at an average or normal viewing distance. With the large screen, however, more the larger display area allows for more picture detail to be discerned at the same distance than with a smaller television screen.
Currently, there are several ways to view multiple pictures simultaneously on a television set. Picture in picture (PIP) allows two pictures to be shown on a television set at the same time, with a smaller picture displayed on top of, or overlaying, a larger picture. Since the smaller picture overlays the larger picture, the larger picture is not entirely visible. This is often extremely inconvenient, as the overlaid picture may cover a portion of the larger picture of interest to the viewer. For example, the overlaid portion might cover the end zone of a football game.
Moreover, conventional PIP often does not display the overlaid pictures in their intended resolution or aspect ratio.
Also, there are PC television cards that can generate and present for display thumb-nail size pictures of many channels, and allow a user to select a channel to view from the small pictures. These small pictures are intended for channel selection purposes. They are small and difficult to be watched over a long period of time. Moreover, the PC television card can only tune to one channel at a time, thus the television channels are scanned one at a time to refresh the pictures. Due to limited processing speed, not all images and sounds of a given television channel are captured by the PC television card. The scanning and tuning speed may be so slow such that the pictures are effectively displayed as still images, or at best in a slow motion manner.
When going from a relatively small conventional television display to a larger and flatter display having improved resolution, consumers expect a major change in their enjoyment of the television viewing experience, especially after they have invested in a good quality large screen HDTV set.
Thus, there is a need to display multiple pictures on a high resolution large screen television set without overlaying another picture, while preserving the high resolution of the displayed pictures.